People continually comment about how lucky I am with mount drops and ask how I can manage it. Well, here’s the secret – I’m not lucky. I’m simply persistent. I mean 182 attempts for the JiKun mount [Clutch of JiKun] is not what I would call lucky but I got it done finally. My warlock was the one with the luck so she got to take the picture on it. It’s a neat mount and I’m glad to finally have it. I think my next focus will be chasing down the four five mounts from the hatchlings. Those are apparently daily quests so I should get there fairly quick since I rather like dailies.

I also got the Flamesaber mount from participating in 15 heroes of the storm games. I teamed up with hubby and another guildie and we just knocked it out in one evening. The games were versus AI and on the easiest setting [we were between 7-15 minutes per game, average was probably 12] as our guildie friend Eth had no experience with the game whatsoever and I was particularly nervous about joining in with random people because I don’t know what I’m doing. Eth liked Muradin and played him largely as a tank [he’s a ret paladin in our raid]. Ven [hubby] like Kael’thas a lot and took great glee in one shotting multiple of the enemy team two at a time with some sort of ability he gained. I ran around on Li Li and healed everyone. I actually made enough gold off the games to go ahead and purchase her since I liked her so much. I also hit level 10. Ten more levels and I get a pet… which I should have gotten way back when but meh…

And while I was doing dailies today, I was running a few toons on my second account through the first boss in Trial of the Crusader to try and get that elusive pet [not the Raiding with Leashes one but the Magnatar Hunting Horn] and it finally dropped. Rarity had recorded about 19 attempts total but I know I’ve probably had somewhere between 30-50 previous to it recording. So I’m rather happy about finally getting that.

I had no luck with the Valentine’s even this year and I ran an absolutely absurd number of toons through daily. My plan is to next year have both accounts full of 16 plus characters and just throw my best effort at it to date but we’ll see how that goes. I foresee lots of level 16 paladins in my future. I did get both of the new toys so yay! Speaking of Love is in the Air, here’s a picture of me having used the potion from the dailies.

I’m also drifting back into my gold making. I’ve not been very good about listing auctions as religiously as I used to at the end of the last expansion and I thought it was time to change that. The good news was that all the BoEs and patterns I had saved up are actually worth a bit more now, though I’ve probably been making a weekly 10-20k off of transmog I’ve posted along the way so I’m definitely in the positive for the expansion. I’ve started watching some Twitch streams again on occasion. I had drifted away from that for a time as well because I just had so much I was working on that I was often dual boxing and watching streams in addition didn’t work.

Since the PrePatch gave us a whole new toy of the transmog variety, there are a lot of addons being created. Here are a few of the very useful ones!

Legion Wardrobe -by ykilgor – offers a variety of improvements to the Blizzard UI and also will tell you if you have an appearance.

Transmog Tokens – by Kruithne – allows you to see based on a tier token if you’re missing any appearances available for purchase with the tokens. Fabulous since many alts had a variety of tokens sitting in their bags!

The next two I found today based on twitter recommendations I happened to catch. I’d credit those who recommended them as well but I cannot remember who did. I’m in the process of playing with these addons now and they seem really good!

mOnAr’s Wardrobe Helper – by qmOnArq – Shows what you’re missing by instance [I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR SOMETHING LIKE THIS YAY!]

Caerdon Wardrobe – by Caerdon – Makes seeing what you have/don’t have more visual.

So I got two mounts today… And these days getting one mount is a big deal.

Well, I was up very late grinding out the last few coins for the fishing mount from Nat Pagle. I finally got it. But I was mumbling how evil the water was when it took nearly 15 minutes to get the very last coin I needed. You can read my insanity on twitter covering it lol.

Crimson Water Strider

I started 23 coins short so that’s not too bad. I know it’s a recolor but it gets me one closer to my goal of 300… Hubby said it looks like an evil version of the water strider and I suppose it does…

After I woke up, I decided to do a few Vortex Pinnacle runs since it’s one of the mounts I’m still missing. I read a little bit on Wowhead and they advised using a hunter/rogue/feral druid just for ease of stealthing through mobs/speed. Monk probably would have worked too as you can just run by most of the mobs, but I went with the hunter and camo’d to the first boss, killed it and just ran to the second. Four or five attempts later, the boss had a purple on it.

Yes, it says 11 attempts there [that’s the Rarity addon – it shows attempts/faux achievements. But that’s a toon I don’t really play much and they had 6-7 attempts when I started. Askevar’s been through that place quite a bit more. So while it seems lucky, I probably have well over 100 attempts on that boss accountwide… and the Rarity addon is a relatively new thing… no idea if it’s counting runs from before either.

But that leaves me 3 mounts shy of the 300 goal. I still need the 5k saberstalker mount… which is a grind I don’t look forward to, the Champion’s Treadblade, and the Mystic Runesaber among others. And there’s my weekly Elegon/Horridon runs that haven’t yielded anything yet.

Yup, hubby and I made it into the Overwatch Beta. First impressions were mixed. I won the first match ever but I’ve lost every single one since… I have a feeling that since others already intimately know the maps and I tend to be somewhat hesitant in an FPS until I do, that’s going to really make my performance suffer.

It’s a pretty polished game… actually reminds me of an upscale version of Unreal Tournament.

I really enjoy playing Reaper but I’m very very bad on him. I’m actually pretty good at Widowmaker. I always was good at sniping back in Battlefield Bad Company 2. This is just a tad bit more fast paced so I almost feel like I certainly have to be ticking off my team constantly. The tank role in Overwatch confuses me… because it just seems like standing there right now and keeping a shield up as much as possible? Anyway, it’s a new game so I’ll learn some. Not sure it will end up being a favorite.

Hubby did the tutorial when he got home last Tuesday and then jumped into a match where he got repeatedly killed by a Roadhog… who seems pretty OP right now… or the learning curve isn’t bad or we are lol. Probably some combination. Learning the maps seems to be key so we’ll probably play around in a private or practice game to explore and learn. It’ll get better when we do.

Blizzcon and E-Sports

So we broke down and bought Virtual Tickets for the first time ever [I wants my Murkidan!]. We’ve found we actually enjoy watching E-Sports. Well, not Hearthstone. We find that akin to watching a couple people play double solitaire… but we really enjoy watching Starcraft. In fact, watching the Starcraft free stream the other year is the reason we got into that game. We haven’t played it too much of late but once Legacy of the Void comes out, I reckon we’ll get some playtime in.

We also watched the WoW arena stream and we really enjoyed that too – including the 6 v 6 exhibition match the other day. I realize in some of the Twitterverse it’s apparently not hip to like the E-Sports and I honestly didn’t think I’d enjoy watching someone else play but I actually do, even though I’m not big on PVP in any game.

The Blog

I’m trying to get back here as I’ve done several times this year. The combination of the state of the game plus the state of the community and my presence of twitter has probably all not helped. Social Media has its advantages but it also has a lot of disadvantages. So hopefully I’ll be writing here more regularly – between WoW goals, Overwatch and Legacy of the Void and let’s not forget Diablo 3 – I have several max level heroes this season. We’ll see